


100 Ways To Say I Love You

by TheoMiller



Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: Christmas, Dead Parents, F/M, Kissing, M/M, Mistletoe, More Mythology, Mythology Parallels, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-05 09:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5370401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each chapter is going to be a little short fic for a prompt from the list of "100 Ways To Say I Love You".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me

**Author's Note:**

> all rightie, jo, have some greek myth inspired nonsense. I DON’T KNOW IT JUST APPEARED IN MY HEAD.

“You’re working yourself to death,” says Johnny.

Reed doesn’t look up. “If I get this wrong---”

“You’ll tear a hole in the universe again?”

He pauses, like he’s thinking it over, like it’s an actual possibility. Which is worrying, actually. “No,” says Reed. “Probably not.”

“Is working on it while sleep deprived and stressed going to increase or decrease the chances of you destroying the galaxy?”

“Uh,” says Reed, pushing up his glasses, “possibly increase. But like I said, the chances are---”

Johnny throws an arm around his shoulders and guides him away from the computer, ignoring his stammered attempts at arguing the point.

“Come on,” he says.

Reed doesn’t even blink when Johnny punches the button for the basement, but Johnny’s not sure he’s even properly awake, so it might not be that he’s actually unconcerned.

Johnny slides his keycard---it still works, which is... surprising, actually, but kind of nice---and turns back to Reed. He’s still got a hand on Reed’s shoulder, no longer slung around them, just resting on one shoulder in a totally manly way. Just bros being bros. Totally could be taken as platonic.

He hesitates, and then moves the hand, brushes it slightly over Reed’s arm before curling his fingers around Reed’s wrist. “Come on,” he says, tugging.

Reed’s hand is a little clammy, but he doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the near-hand-holding going on here.  _Score_. He leads Reed into the room.

“Is this---” Reed asks, squinting around.

“It’s where they store the research cadavers. We can leave, if it bothers you..”

“I don’t mind the dead,” Reed says. “They’re actually... pretty preferable to the living, generally.”

Johnny grins. “Even to me?”

“No,” says Reed. “Not to you.”

He drops Reed’s hand to climb up on top of a steel table, shrugging off his backpack once he’s there. “Come on,” he says. “Don’t worry, no one comes down here, it’s too spooky for people to visit at night.”

“Why do you come down here?”

“It’s my favorite place, are you kidding? I used to want to be a medical examiner, actually, but then I realized that meant going to school for, like, ten years.  _So_ not worth the six figure paycheck.”

Reed clambers up after him, and sits crosslegged opposite him. Johnny huffs. “All right there, Molly Ringwald?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“C’mon, man, tell me you’ve seen  _The Breakfast Club_.”

“Oh. Yeah, I have. Is she in that?”

“She plays Claire, man.”

“I don’t think I can dance on this table without falling off,” says Reed, with a small smile.

Johnny grins back at him. “I knew it. I knew you’d love that movie, you probably personally identified with Brian Johnson---”

“Allison,” corrects Reed, softly.

He leans back a little, considering this from all angles, thinking  _they ignore me_  and then settles on saying, “You’re full of surprises, buddy.”

“Yeah, well,” Reed says.

Johnny tugs the zipper on his backpack open. “What do you want?” He asks, holding it out. It’s full of food, because he doesn’t carry anything but snacks and his phone most of the time.

“Are you allowed to eat in here?”

“Oh, no, it breaks, like, every rule.”

Reed looks briefly concerned, and then Johnny adds, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Deal,” says Reed, and carefully selects a bag of pretzels.

Johnny grabs a bag of chocolate covered pomegranate seeds, because they are delicious and he can totally pretend they count as fruit. Reed is quiet, munching on his pretzels with a distant expression. "You gotta take better care of yourself, man," says Johnny. "You'll go crazy, working yourself half to death and then getting up at the crack of dawn to do it again the next day."

"I have to---" starts Reed.

Johnny reaches out and rests a hand on Reed's knee to quiet him. "Reed," he says, "the gate doesn't have a due date. I know you want to finish it, I know it matters a lot to you, but it's not going to help us finish it any sooner if you end up having a nervous breakdown. You don't want to end up like Victor, do you?"

Reed snorts. "That's not---Victor's all right," he says.

"Oh, man, you're already going insane, I'm too late," says Johnny, and clutches a hand to his heart dramatically.

"I just mean," starts Reed, but he's laughing too much to finish. "Okay. Okay, so, maybe I want to be a little less... prickly... than Victor. But I don't want to spend ten years getting nowhere, either."

"I'm not saying you shouldn't work hard, man, I know you love this project. But you need to relax sometimes. Indulge a little, live the college experience, enjoy your life. Don't let this gate become your life. You deserve more than that."

"You think?" Reed says.

Johnny may have tipped his hand a little. But he keeps his poker face. "Sure," he says.

Reed nods to himself, and adjusts his glasses. "All right. All right, uh, how do you suggest I do that? Relax, I mean."

Johnny holds out his bag of candy. "Try new things, dude. You never know. They might be great, you know, even better than you're expecting. Completely unexpected, even," Johnny's babbling, because apparently he's not quite prepared for making full on eye contact with the object of his super embarrassing crush. Reed stares back at him. Is he reading into this, or is Reed---?

"Try some," says Johnny, after the silent, tense moment stretches a little too long and his resolve falters.

Reed's hand dips into the bag. He bites into one, cautiously, even though they're tiny and it's kind of pointless not to just eat the whole one, and, oh, sweet baby j, he's got a smudge of chocolate on his lip.

"What are these?" asks Reed after a moment, head cocked. He puts the other half of the candy in his mouth, and reaches back to take a few more. "They're good."

"Pomegranate seeds," Johnny says.

Reed, surprisingly, laughs quietly. "Of course. That's funny, it's kind of like that myth."

Johnny shrugs. "Guess this is kind of the underworld of Baxter. You know, I could rock the Hades thing. Think I could get someone to genetically engineer me a three headed dog?" He jokes.

Reed doesn't reply. He's staring at the candies in the palm of his hand. Then, "Trying new things," he says quietly, and drops them back in the bag. Johnny doesn't get a chance to ask him what's wrong, though, because he's shuffling around to move closer to Johnny.

"Reed," says Johnny.

"Yeah?"

"If those candies magically bound you to me, you should probably tell me, so I can file a class action lawsuit and---"

Reed kisses him. Softly, gently, like he's waiting for Johnny to recoil. Johnny feels like he might spook Reed if he moves, so he summons all his willpower to focus on staying very, very still while Reed pulls back to stare at him.

"I wanted to try that," he says.

Johnny swallows. "Scientific curiosity?" he says.

"Something like that."

"You, uh, find the conclusion to that experiment?"

"The results are positive thus far," says Reed, "but I'd suggest repeating it to make sure the results aren't influenced by, uhm, external factors. What are, what are your impressions of the experiment?"

"I'm no scientist," Johnny says, "but I can't argue with repetition. For science, of course."

"For science," agrees Reed, with a tiny grin.

Johnny kisses him again---for science, clearly.

(He tastes like pomegranate and chocolate. Johnny's definitely not complaining.)


	2. This Christmas (I'll Burn It To The Ground)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the mayor of this sad city, who requested "can I kiss you?".

Victor's mother loved Christmas.

It's one of the few things he remembers from _before_ , before the hospital and the illness that stripped her of everything before it finally it killed her, with her awareness last.

He hates everything about the holiday.

"It's becoming a shopping holiday," his mother had said, once, raging. The illness hit her like that sometimes, fury and restlessness. Her eyes had been the only part of her that looked _alive_ , then. "The corporations are tearing it apart."

But that was easy anger, common. Johnny had barked a laugh the first time, even, that Victor had called it _the birthday of our lord and savior, capitalism_.

It's the other stuff that he hates more. There's a towering Norway spruce in one of the dorm's common areas, and he replaces the water at the base with weed killer, even though getting that close to it means his clothes gather needles and for the rest of the day he's haunted by the faint, spicy smell of pine.

With it comes memories of his mother carefully surveying each tree in the lot, her long wool duster's collar turned up, her beautiful silk scarf tucked artfully inside, her bright blue eyes studying the trees in turns. Victor had hung ornaments on the lower parts of the tree while his mother talked about the Christmases in Latveria, eyes distant. The palatial home, with its rococo architecture, the beautiful gold foil columns all lit up by candles.

One of the enterprising students from ESU covered their campus in poinsettias, and Baxter – not to be outdone – covered everything in holly. Victor made a bonfire with it in the parking garage, where the security camera was out. It just makes him feel worse, remembering the fire roaring in the grate of their fireplace, remembering the way his mother had coughed the last time, wheezing and moving her velvet armchair further from the fire, saying _it's just the soot, Vitya_.

Eggnog is a convenient excuse to have bourbon with him at all times, but hot cocoa—it's the worst thing, honestly, when Sue drops into the seat beside him, opposite her brother, with a tall mug of the stuff. It's _real_ , too, homemade like his mother's had been. She'd always put cayenne in it – it made it that much more warming, the heat following the sweetness and spreading in his chest.

The cheap stuff turns out to be that much worse, when Johnny shows up. It stirs up other scent memories: the antiseptic, the stale air, the terrible cafeteria food, followed by images of long white hallways, a flickering fluorescent light in the waiting area outside the operating rooms, the uncomfortable chair beside his mother's bed, the steady beeping and the whirring of the oxygen mask.

He leaves, blind and half-stumbling, and ignores Sue's concerned calling after him.

Franklin Storm invites him to family dinner. Victor makes it through the ham that tastes like ash in his mouth, but it's the nut bread that gets him.

"I have to go," he says, and stalks out, barely remembering to grab his coat. There's snow drifting down outside – huge clumps of the stuff that catches the faint stirrings of the air on its way to the ground.

Sue follows him. "Victor," she calls, from the steps of her father's house.

He pauses and turns to look at her. She's clutching her plaid shawl over her dress, and she's already shivering, but she doesn't look angry or even frustrated, just sad. Sympathetic, he realizes, sourly.

"I don't want your sympathy, Susan."

"I know," she says simply. She just looks at him, her gaze steady and expression soft, snowflakes gathering in her hair like a lace veil has been draped over her. "Merry Christmas, Victor."

Victor goes home and drinks until he's pretty sure he won't wake up on Christmas, or that he at least won't remember if he does, and then he sleeps and dreams of his mother's hands shaking as she opens a gift in her hospital room, a bright splash of glossy red paper against the white sheets. But then he realizes she's not opening it, she's trying to clean it off, and that's when he realizes the box is white. It's blood.

He wakes up in his bathroom. The tile is cold, and he rests his aching head against it. Before he passes out again, he feels light fingers brushing through his hair.

The next time he wakes, the snow has stopped, piles drifted against his windows. He's on his couch, with a bucket beside him.

"Sue," he rasps.

She's there, curled up and wrapped in a blanket he doesn't recognize. "Victor," is all she says in reply.

He lets the silence hang, and she doesn't fill it. They sit in silence for what must be hours, as he drifts in and out of sleep.

When the semester begins, there are remnants, but it's easier. It's not the topic of every conversation he hears in the hall, not anymore. There are no more gifts exchanged in the lab, no more wreaths on classroom doors.

"Mistletoe," says Sue, and he glances at her—he hadn't heard her approach, but he's comfortable with her. His subconscious doesn't throw up red flags when she enters his personal space. Then her words register, and he looks up.

"A poisonous, parasitic plant associated with the holiday for truly ridiculous reasons," says Victor.

"Loki," she says, and she sounds amused. "I would have thought you would like him."

He does. Odin is everything he hates about the world, and considering what they do to Loki's children – it's no wonder he killed Baldr, he thinks.

"A story about fratricide that leads to an excuse for socio-normative sexual assault," he says instead.

"Yeah," says Sue. "I know why you hate Christmas."

"Sure you do."

"It brings up painful memories. Because you loved it, once. Because you loved your mother, and she loved it, and everything that you once loved is now just a reminder that she's gone. But that's not why you hate it."

His heart is pounding.

"You hate it because you miss it, a lot, and no-one ever told you that it was okay to finish the grief process and be sort of okay again. Because you lost all the people who should've taught you that. You hate Christmas because you feel like you're betraying your mother every time you want to celebrate it again."

"You're wrong," says Victor, shaking his head, but feeling numb.

"Can I kiss you?" she asks.

It's a complete non sequitur, and it throws him. " _What_?"

"I'm trying to avoid socio-normative sexual assault," she says.

"What about all the—all the absolute nonsense—"

Sue takes his hand. "We have all the time in the world to worry about grieving," she says. "It's a brand new year."


End file.
